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Tuesday, August 7, 2012

5 Ways You Don’t Realize Movies Are Controlling Your Brain

So there was a mass shooting during a Batman
movie and, goddamn it, it turned out the killer owned a Batman mask and
called himself “The Joker.” By now, several talking heads have come to
the conclusion that the movie somehow triggered the massacre, or
whatever. You know the game at this point — sadly, we’ve seen this whole
cycle play out more than once.
As always, this knee-jerk reaction by old, scared talking heads will
predictably result in most of our audience scoffing and saying that
movies can’t influence people to do anything, because movies are
make-believe and every non-crazy member of the audience knows how to
separate fact from fiction.Well, the thing is … that is equally wrong. But not for the reason the talking heads think.#5. No, You Can’t Separate Fact from Fiction
You’ve seen Braveheart, right? You know that’s based on a
historical event — the movie makes it clear that Mel Gibson’s character,
William Wallace, was a real guy who really lived in Scotland back in
the horse and castle days. You also know that Hollywood spiced things up
for the movie — the real Wallace probably never assassinated a dude and
then jumped his horse off a balcony in slow motion.
So if you don’t mind, just quickly tell me which parts were fiction. Without looking it up.
Like the evil king they were fighting — was he a real historical
figure, too? What about Wallace’s palooka friend, Hamish? Or the crazy
Irish sidekick? Were those real guys? That part where Mel Gibson’s main
ally (Robert the Bruce) betrayed him and sided with the English in that
big battle (aka the turning point of the entire story)– did that really
happen? What about the bit at the end, where Wallace has sex with that
princess, revealing that the future king of England would actually be
Mel Gibson’s son? That’s the most historically important thing in the
whole film, surely that was true, right? You don’t know, do you? But who cares, right? It’s not like that
impacts your life at all. It’s just historical trivia. OK, now consider
this: After Jaws hit theaters, we nearly drove sharks to extinction with feverish hunting, to the point that their populations may never recover.Every single person who saw that movie knew that it was fiction, and
that those characters were just actors. They probably knew that, in real
life, there isn’t a shark big enough to eat your boat. But,
when the genius scientist character in the movie agreed that killing the
shark was the only way to prevent dead tourists, we assumed that part was true. The same as we assumed you could really blow up an oxygen tank by shooting it.
So, we killed all the sharks, based on what the make-believe movie told us.
Ah, but that’s one oddball isolated incident. Hey, did you know that after Top Gun, Navy aviator recruitment skyrocketed by as much as 500 fucking percent? Or that the number of kids taking martial arts classes exploded after The Karate Kid? Or that the popularity of the CSI TV shows has resulted in a glut of students going into forensic sciences? Or that I could cite examples of this until you hit your monthly bandwidth cap? How many of you left Fight Club thinking you knew how to make napalm? Which of us haven’t forced a baby to do that wanking motion after watching The Hangover?
I know what some of you are already saying: “So, what, because some
gullible people do what movies tell them, that means a Batman movie made
that guy shoot up the theater? So I suppose watching Bridesmaids made us all start shitting in sinks.”No. You’re intentionally reaching for examples where it
doesn’t happen, and ignoring all of the ones where it does — even if
some movie straight up told you to become a mass murderer, it’d be
working against a lifetime of society pounding the opposite message into
your brain. The point of this article isn’t to pin violence on movies.
The point is that it’s much bigger than that. Because …

#4. Stories Were Invented to Control You
This isn’t some paranoid conspiracy theory — it’s a fundamental part
of how human culture came about. Ask yourself: Why do we go watch
superhero movies? After all, variations of these stories about brave,
superhuman heroes predate recorded history. We used to tell them around
campfires before written language even existed.
They were created as a way to teach you how to behave.
Thousands of years ago, when your ancestors were living in tribes and
hunting gazelles for food, nobody knew how to read. Even if they could,
paper wasn’t a thing, parchment was rare and precious. They had no
written historical records, they had no educational system that could
devote years to teaching history to the kids.
This was a problem. Once humans started forming civilizations, the
guys in charge didn’t just need the next generation of children to know
how to fish and hunt, they needed citizens who would fall in line and
fight for the tribe. That meant the kids needed to understand the big
picture: why preserving the tribe is important, why we hate the tribe
across the river, why our tribe is better than that tribe, why it’s
important to go off and fight in the next war no matter how scared you
are.
Now, to do this, they could either A) bore the kids to death with a
years-long recounting of the history of the tribe, which nobody has
probably written down anyway or B) tell them a cool story. They could
tell the thrilling tale of Kolgor the Valiant who, when the evil
neighboring tribe came to slay all of the women and children, stood
alone and fought bravely through the night, with four arrows in his
chest, until the enemy retreated in terror. You want to be like Kolgor,
don’t you, little one? Otherwise, he will have died in vain.
Clearly “B” is the one that is going to stick in the kid’s brain. It
doesn’t matter that the story is either fiction or grossly exaggerated —
it gets the job done, it makes the kid conform to be the kind of
citizen the tribe needs him to be. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing —
your tribe may very well be better than the one across the river, your
real history is probably full of real heroes whose sacrifices were just
as important as, if less romantic than, Kolgor the Valiant’s. The tribe
didn’t go with the fictional version because they were liars, they went
with it because it was the only way for the “truth” to survive.
So while we use the word “myth” these days to mean “a lie that needs
to be debunked,” often the myths were simply more efficient versions of
the truth. They’re easier to remember, they don’t take as long to tell
and they eliminate a lot of the messy ambiguities that can confuse the
point. Also, they won’t bore the listener to tears.
The point is, this is why stories were invented — to shape your brain in a certain way. A guy named Joseph Campbell wrote whole books about it, you should read them.
These basic stories, these myths of the hero overcoming the odds, the
great man who sacrifices himself for the greater good — they’re what
make civilization go. In a society, the people and the buildings and the
roads are the hardware, mythology is the software.
And while your ancestors had their heroes that they heard about
around the campfire, you have Batman, and Luke Skywalker, and Harry
Potter. And yes, the movies you watched this summer serve the same purpose as those ancient myths. Sometimes this is super obvious (clearly Rocky IV and The Day After Tomorrow
are trying to cram a message into your brain with the subtlety of a
sweatpants erection). But what’s the message behind James Bond? Or Iron Man?
“There isn’t one!”
That literally isn’t possible.
You see …

#3. The Writer of a Story Always Has an Agenda
Quiz Time: What do these hugely popular hero characters all have in common?
Batman
Spider-Man
Superman
Luke Skywalker
Frodo from The Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter
Finn from Adventure TimeGot it yet? They’re all orphans.
That’s kind of weird, right? Do you think that’s a random choice? Do you think the writer just flipped a coin? Or do you think there’s an emotional button that is being pushed there, the writer reaching around the logical part of your brain and triggering something inside you without you knowing it?
That sounds devious, but those little subconscious tricks are Fiction Writing 101 (we covered a bunch of them here).
It’s a scary power to entrust someone with, if you think about it.
Especially if you, as the audience, don’t pay close attention to what
they’re doing. You leave the theater a different person than you were
when you came in. It’s a difference in millimeters, sure, but you’re
going to watch a thousand hours of the stuff in the course of a year. It
builds up.
“What, so you’re trying to tell me there’s some hidden agenda behind the Transformers movies? It’s freaking robots punching each other!”
No, there is no intentional hidden agenda (well, maybe a little), but there is certainly a set of assumptions that the filmmakers are passing on to you. In the case of Transformers,
the assumption is that combat is beautiful and exciting, that military
hardware is sexy, that destruction is gorgeous and fun and completely
free of consequence. And, most importantly, that the solution to all
conflict is to be more masculine, powerful, aggressive, confident and
destructive than the bad guys.
“But the people already think that! These movies are just giving us what we want!”
Right, but why do you want that? You think you came out of
the womb thinking that military hardware was cool? If you grew up in a
real war zone, and didn’t have movies and TV, would you have the same
opinion?
I’m not saying Michael Bay is a secret tool of the military
industrial complex trying to brainwash you into supporting the next war,
no more than the makers of Jaws were trying to wipe out the
sharks — they were just trying to make a scary movie, and Michael Bay is
just a dude who likes explosions. It doesn’t matter why the
message is there — it soaks into your brain either way. This is what
everyone misses when debating this stuff — one side says, “Hollywood is
trying to brainwash you!” and the other side says, “Michael Bay isn’t
smart enough to brainwash an armadillo!” and they’re both missing the
point.
This is why, when some people point out how racist the Lord of the Rings stories are
(i.e., orcs are evil by virtue of being born orcs, dwarfs are greedy
because they are dwarfs, Aragorn is heroic due to his “blood”), it’s
both correct and unfair. It’s correct because, yes, that is the
way Tolkien’s universe is set up — nobody in the stories hesitates to
make sweeping generalizations about a race, and they’re always proven
right when they do. Frodo’s magical sword didn’t glow in the presence of
enemies, it glowed in the presence of a certain race (orcs). Go write a movie about a hero with a gun that glows in the presence of Arabs. See what happens.
But it’s also unfair, because Tolkien clearly didn’t sit down and
think, “I’m going to increase the net weight of racism in the world in
order to firmly establish white dominance! And I’ll do it with elves!”
He was just writing what he knew. Of course a guy born in 1892 assumed
that Nordic races were evolved and graceful, that certain other races
were born savages and that midgets love axes. Hell, he could have been
the least racist person he knew, and he’d still be the equivalent of a
Klansman today. Whether or not the agenda was intentional is utterly irrelevant.
I can’t emphasize this enough – there is no conspiracy. Yeah, you’ll occasionally have a movie like Act of Valor
that is transparently intended to boost military recruitment, but 99
percent of the time, the movie’s “agenda” is nothing more than a lot of
creative people passing along their own psychological hang-ups,
prejudices, superstitions, ignorance and fetishes, either intentionally
or unintentionally. But they are still passed on to you, because that’s what stories are designed to do.
Michael Bay feels a certain way about women, and about the role of
women in the world, and you will leave his movie agreeing with him just a
little bit more than when you came in.
Knowing that, it’s even scarier to consider that …

#2. You Were Raised -- and Educated -- by Pop Culture

Quick quiz: If you get arrested by the cops, how many phone calls are you legally allowed?
One, right? "I want my one phone call" -- somewhere there's a suspect
saying that exact phrase to his arresting officer. He may even insist
that it's in the Constitution.
And this is when the cop has to explain that it's an urban legend, and that he'd already know that if he read Cracked. This criminal, and you, only believe the "one phone call" rule because you saw it in movies and cop shows.

In fact, pretty much everything you know about the criminal justice
system came from actors on a glowing rectangular screen. Have you ever
been called for jury duty? Did you sit through the morning training
session where they have to carefully explain that real trials are not like TV shows?
That's why movies are so effective at shaping your personality:
because you subconsciously assumed that large parts of these fictional
stories weren't fiction. Sure, you knew True Lies was a silly
Schwarzenegger action movie, and you knew that, in real life, nobody
could really ramp a dirt bike off a Washington, DC, skyscraper. But you
didn't know that the city doesn't even have skyscrapers at all. Even though the movie was fiction, you didn't doubt that part, because you had no reason to.

Now take this one step further, and think about how many other
aspects of your life you've only experienced via Hollywood. If you're
from a rural area, how do you know what it's like to live in the city?
Or vice versa? If you've never been to Paris, where does your mental
image of it come from? Some of you reading this very article loved The Sopranos
because its depiction of the mob was so much more "realistic" than all
those stylized movies that came before it. How do you know it's more
realistic? What are you comparing it to? All those real mobsters who
come over at Thanksgiving?
The reality is that vast piles of facts that you have crammed into
your brain basement were picked up from pop culture, and for the most
part, you don't realize that's where the information came from. This is called source amnesia, and I've talked about it before
-- you know that giraffes sleep standing up, but you've long forgotten
whether you heard that fact in school or in a tour at the zoo, or saw it
in a cartoon. Either way, you will treat that fact as true until
something comes along to counter it -- this is the entire reason MythBusters is still on the air.

OK, so who cares if gas tanks don't really explode when you shoot them? So what if a lot of your interesting party trivia isn't accurate?
What, you don't think this same principle goes for the important stuff?
When you went on your first date, you had a picture in your mind of
what that should look like -- how both of you should behave, what type
of activities couples do together, which one of you should pay, etc.
Where did that picture come from? Did you take a dating class in
elementary school? Did your parents sit you down and tell you? Bullshit.
You saw it in a TV show, or a cartoon, a solid decade before you were
even old enough to drive.

Getty"One day, I'll meet the right grotesquely muscled deliveryman and settle down to a life of kissing on top of washing machines."

If your parents were poor, where did you get your idea of how rich
people live? Where did you get your concept of what success looks like
-- how successful people dress, or what they drive, or how they decorate
their apartment? Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood -- the only reason
you've heard of Armani suits is because the 1980 movie American Gigolo
launched the brand. The reason you think smoking is cool is because
you've seen a thousand handsome, smooth leading men smoke cigarettes.

Getty"Not me. My friends and I all dress and think alike out of sheer coincidence."

In other words, fictional stories shaped your entire world.
You will instinctively reject this idea because you hate the thought
that anyone but you has made you who you are. But every single point of
data will prove you wrong.
"Bullshit! I just watch movies and TV shows for fun! It's escapism,
it lets me turn off my brain and relax while things explode behind
Samuel L. Jackson!"
Right, but why does that relax you? Why have you been
trained to feel a release of stress when you see a bad guy explode? Why
do you prefer that world over your own?
Let me put it another way. "Escapism" and "fantasy" are fun because they let us leave this boring old world and go to a world that we would prefer to live in.
And we are defined as a people by those fantasies -- after all, we will
spend our whole lives trying to make the real world look like the
fantasy. Science fiction came first, space travel came later.

Mythology still drives us, and defines us. Now stop and ask yourself who we've entrusted to write it for us.
Which brings us to the heart of this whole matter ...

#1. Everything in Your Brain Is a Story

Getty
Let me ask you this:
Why was it so easy to rally Americans around the idea of winning
World War II, to the point that we were willing to ration and sacrifice
and send an entire generation off to war, when it's so hard to get us
worked up about other things like curing cancer or fixing global
warming?
I'll come back to it in a moment.
So, knowing the history of stories and all that stuff I talked about
above, it makes sense that our brains are built to try to process
everything we see as a story. We want all of our information packaged
this way -- it's the way data has been fed to us for the last thousand
generations, it's how you've been absorbing it since the first time your
parents read you a bedtime story. And every story needs to have two
elements: a defined set of good guys and bad guys, and a neat structure
with a beginning, middle and end.

Getty"Can anyone tell me why they were telling the man to squeal like a pig? Anyone?"

The fact that we need everything fed to us like this, and have
trouble getting interested in a situation without it, actually makes
solving some problems almost impossible.
For instance, the answer to my question above is that we cared about
World War II because it was a story: it had villains (Hitler and the
rest), it had heroes (the Allies), it had a distinct beginning, middle
and end. Cancer doesn't have any of that -- there's no one guy we can
blame for cancer, and "winning the war" against it is actually a series
of tiny incremental advancements that may never result in "victory."
Global warming is even worse, because there it looks like the villain is us.
So as a society, our entire process for figuring out and solving
problems involves clumsily trying to make a story out of them. When we
follow a complicated subject like politics, we need that distinct hero
and villain, so we'll ignore the shortcomings of our guy and amplify the
shittiness of their guy, to make them fit that mold. When we hear about
a war, it's almost impossible to think of it in terms of multiple
factions all acting in self-interest -- we need one side we can root
for, usually under the guise of the underdog young rebels overthrowing
the evil old empire (i.e., the Arab Spring).

Getty"Look, all I want to know is which side is Han Solo."

Likewise, we lose interest if our news story doesn't have a clear beginning, middle and end (in the biz they call this the "narrative bias").
Are American troops still in Afghanistan? How is that going? Do you
even know? When's the last time you checked? We were all on board for
the first act of the story (the 9/11 attacks) and the second act (the
military goes in and deposes the Taliban), but then the third act (the
troops come home to victory parades and everything is back to normal)
never came. So, we just kind of forgot about it.
Now here's the key: This innate urge to shoehorn every single piece
of information into a story format is very well known to the people who
run political campaigns, or write advertisements, or cover news stories.
So, when there is a crisis, they know you need a bad guy. No problem
can simply be the result of a flawed system or a bunch of factors that
are nobody's fault (or, God forbid, the result of anything we did -- we're just the audience!). No, there has to be a villain we can pin it on.

GettyTim Jorgenson of Grand Rapids, Michigan -- we're coming for you.

That's why, to this day, we're still trying to figure out who
"caused" the economic collapse, as if we'll find a cabal of a dozen
shady bankers in a room who made off with all our money, rather than a
flawed system that millions of investors and consumers drove into the
ditch because of a steadfast refusal to think five minutes into the
future. Look at the last few wars again -- we can't get past the idea
that terrorism will end if we just blow the shit out of the bad guys.
Why? Because that's the way it works in the movies. In Star Wars,
when the Emperor died, all evil died with him. The same with Sauron,
and Voldemort. If we kill/imprison all the drug kingpins, the drugs will
go away. Right? Guys?
You can find this in your personal life, too. If something goes wrong
at the office, somebody has to get blamed. Everyone goes into
ass-covering mode, because they know the bosses will need a villain in their
story. When you take on some personal project (a new job, losing
weight, whatever), you expect the same three-act structure that you'd
see in a movie (see problem, take it on, experience your darkest moment,
eventually triumph), and you get depressed when it doesn't happen
(that "triumph" part often never shows up). Why are people always so
obsessed with the apocalypse? Because every story has an ending, and the
idea that the human "story" can just drag on forever, aimlessly, never
progressing toward any particular goal, is just unimaginable. We can't
process it.

GettyThe reality is, it will probably still look like this,
long after we've been exterminated by the robots we designed to protect
us.

And our expectations of what these real world stories look like, and
how they should play out, are programmed into us by pop culture.

So, yes, for the fucking love of God, movies matter. TV shows matter.
Novels matter. They shape the lens through which you see the world. The
very fact that you don't think they matter, that even right now you're still
resisting the idea, is what makes all of this so dangerous to you --
you watch movies so you can turn off your brain and let your guard down.
But while your guard is down, you're letting them jack directly into
that part of your brain that creates your mythology. If you think about
it, it's an awesome responsibility on the part of the storyteller. And
you're comfortable handing that responsibility over to Michael Bay.
It's just something to keep in mind, that's all.